But consider their challenge. These students must adjust to a new country while learning English quickly enough to finish high school and compete with native English speakers for places in university, college or the workplace.

Roessingh compares it to a horse race in which immigrant students are initially set well behind, and must challenge for the lead by the time they reach the finish line.

In Grade 2, a typical student can use about 7,000 words of English. A Chinese student who emigrates to Canada in Grade 2 can, with hard work, gain the ability to use about 5,000 words of English after two years. But by Grade 4, his classmates have now vaulted ahead and most have added thousands more words to their vocabularies while absorbing more of the general curriculum. "Often," Roessingh said, "they keep moving ahead faster than the immigrant kids can catch up. It's a never-ending race for them."

In recognition of the extraordinary challenge faced by students, most large school boards in Canada began offering ESL classes during the 1960s.

The program expanded dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s as immigration levels rose and more newcomers came to Canada from non-English speaking countries: China, Hong Kong, Somalia, Sudan, Croatia, Afghanistan, Russia and Iran. The expansion of ESL programs was supported by research that suggested these students needed help to develop the advanced English skills that would allow them to deal with the sophisticated language of textbooks in high school, college and university.

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`I think ESL kids need not only a good teacher, but a good language teacher.'

Hetty Roessingh,

University of Calgary

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`We realized ... nobody fought for the immigrant children and youth.'

Hieu Van Ngo, Coalition for

Equal Access to Education

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Although most immigrants can develop a working knowledge of English within a few years, the range and accuracy of their vocabularies are limited, making it difficult to perform well on tests and exams.

Some critics, however, point to earlier waves of immigrants — those who came after World War II from places such as Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland and Ukraine — to argue that ESL classes are an unnecessary luxury. Those newcomers made the transition to life in Canada by being thrown into mainstream classrooms, so why can't the new generation do the same?

But those earlier immigrants likely suffered from dropout rates that were as bad or worse than today's ESL students. (Such statistics, however, simply were not kept then.) Moreover, those immigrants who did leave high school during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s still made comfortable lives for themselves in Canada. There was little stigma attached to being a dropout and high-paying union jobs in construction, mining and manufacturing were largely filled by post-war immigrants.

Circumstances have changed for more recent immigrants, especially those to arrive during the past 20 years. High-school education is now considered a bare minimum qualification by most employers; many high-paying, low-skilled jobs disappeared in the 1980s as the economy was reshaped by free trade and technology.